Bitcoin and the Rise of a Digital Counterculture

You say you want a revolution? Several hundred entrepreneurs, dreamers, technophiles, and the simply curious gathered Tuesday in midtown Manhattan for “Inside Bitcoins,” a one-day conference promoting and exploring the mushrooming world of digital currencies. Bloomberg News There was a lot of talk about regulatory hurdles, and freedom of speech, replacing an archaic financial system, and of course fiat currencies, which are almost treated like a dirty word among the faithful. What emerged from the conference, to our eyes at least, is something more singular: The rise of a digital counterculture that in its anti-authoritarian, Utopian idealism resembles the counterculture of the 1960s. It wasn’t just that the people at the conference – about 350 attended, according to MediaBistro, which sponsored it – were mostly male and overwhelmingly young, that sneakers and t-shirts out...